command line utility that performs an HTML element selection on HTML content passed to the stdin. Using css selectors that everybody knows. Since input comes from stdin and output is sent to stdout, it can easily be used inside traditional UNIX pipelines to extract content from webpages and html files. tq provides extra formating options such as json-encoding or newlines squashing, so it can play nicely with everyones favourite command line tooling.

Now _this_ makes me feel old. Alternative title: "why static website generators have been a good idea since WebMake, 15 years ago".

WebMake does pretty well on the checklist of "key features of the modern static website generator", which are:

1. Templating (check);
2. Markdown support (well, EtText, which predated Markdown by several years);
3. Metadata (check); and
4. Javascript asset pipeline (didn't support this one, since complex front-end DHTML JS wasn't really a thing at the turn of the century. But I would have if it had ;).

'If it works, a copy of Burgertime for DOS is now in your browser, clickable from my entry. If it doesn’t… well, no Burgertime for you. (Unless you visit the page.) There’s a “share this” link in the new archive.org interface for sharing these in-browser emulations in web pages, weblogs and who knows what else.'

John Gruber’s canonical description of Markdown’s syntax does not specify the syntax unambiguously. In the absence of a spec, early implementers consulted the original Markdown.pl code to resolve these ambiguities. But Markdown.pl was quite buggy, and gave manifestly bad results in many cases, so it was not a satisfactory replacement for a spec.

Because there is no unambiguous spec, implementations have diverged considerably. As a result, users are often surprised to find that a document that renders one way on one system (say, a GitHub wiki) renders differently on another (say, converting to docbook using Pandoc). To make matters worse, because nothing in Markdown counts as a “syntax error,” the divergence often isn't discovered right away.

There's no standard test suite for Markdown; the unofficial MDTest is the closest thing we have. The only way to resolve Markdown ambiguities and inconsistencies is Babelmark, which compares the output of 20+ implementations of Markdown against each other to see if a consensus emerges.

We propose a standard, unambiguous syntax specification for Markdown, along with a suite of comprehensive tests to validate Markdown implementations against this specification. We believe this is necessary, even essential, for the future of Markdown.

'I'd really prefer not to fork the language; I'd much rather collectively help carry the banner of Markdown forward into the future, with the blessing of John Gruber and in collaboration with other popular sites that use Markdown. So... who's with me?'

'free, open, developer-generated APIs for a wide variety of websites. Parselets.com is a place to create and share them. [..] Check out [..] ways to use parselets from our web service, Ruby, Python, C/C++, or the *nix command-line.'

'Google Docs offers an undocumented feature that lets you embed PDF files and PowerPoint presentations in a web page. The files don't have to be uploaded to Google Docs, but they need to be available online.' sweet!